A Gallery of Cognitive Systems

ERCIM News is a quarterly publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The April 2003 issue is dedicated to research about cognitive systems. It contains no less than 21 articles which are all available online.

Here are references to some articles I found particularly interesting, with their abstracts and pictures. Of course, you're encouraged to read the individual articles if you need more information.

A setup for a mobile user employing Augmented Reality for indoor and outdoor applications has been developed at Delft University of Technology. To determine the user's position and orientation in the world, it uses a cognition system similar to that used by our autonomous soccer playing robots. In order to let robot and man cooperate, a knowledge system shared by man and robot is under development, in which both can express their understanding of the 'world' as they perceive it. Applications include rescue operations in hazardous situations.

Take a look at these autonomous soccer playing robots using cognition systems for ambient awareness.

The effective development of a system consisting of autonomous heterogeneous robots that have to perform complex tasks over long periods of time, operating in a partially known and partially observable environment, implies addressing a wide range of issues. These issues involve many areas of Artificial Intelligence, from computer vision to deductive systems.

Cognitive Vision Systems' is a European project addressing issues related to categorisation, recognition, learning, interpretation and integration in relation to vision systems for intelligent embodied systems.

This image illustrates the complexity of recognizing chairs as no single technique in terms of contours, appearance, components etc. is adequate to correctly allow 'counting of the number of chairs'. (Source: Bülthoff, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPIK), Tübingen, Germany.)

Swarm-bots are a collection of mobile robots able to self-assemble and to self-organize in order to solve problems that cannot be solved by a single robot. These robots combine the power of swarm intelligence with the flexibility of self-reconfiguration as aggregate swarm-bots can dynamically change their structure to match environmental variations.

Here is the design of a single s-bot.

And here is a swarm-bot made of several assembled s-bots passing a fosse.

Growing numbers of road users and the limited resources provided by current infrastructures lead to ever increasing traveling times. The Intelligent Traffic Light Control project pursued at Utrecht University aims at diminishing waiting times before red traffic lights in a city.

Research by the Cortex Research Team at INRIA Lorraine is focusing on the design of biologically inspired models with numerical and robust mechanisms, which can promote the emergence of multimodal representations within the framework of real-world robotics.

This is their Koala robot and its pan/tilt camera testing the robustness of the models in real world conditions. (Copyright INRIA)